Review - American Jewish Archives

144 American Jewish Archives
agreeable terms without the missionary presence, but the latter
added to the ill feelings and mistrust. Rabbi Hertz's opinion was not
unique; Orthodox Jews blamed conversion to Christianity on the
turning away from"0bserving Torah and Mitzvot (commandments)."
If Jews adhered to their old religion they would have been immune
to the seductions of other religions. Strengthening the Orthodox ed-
ucational system was their proposed remedy to the missionary
threat. "The only way to counteract the pernicious influences of the
hypocritical missionaries,'' claimed Rabbi Mordecai Aaron Kaplan
of the Lower East Side, was by "the establishment of Talmud Torahs
(religious schools for children) and synagogue^."'^
At times spokesmen for the Jewish elite made an effort to per-
suade the Christian community, on moral grounds, that proselytiz-
ing Jews was inherently wrong.'7 Jews could not understand why
otherwise honest, intelligent Christians should support and, worse
still, be involved in evangelizing Jews. Perhaps if they were told
how the Jews felt about the matter they would give up on mission-
izing. The Jews who had been noted in the New Testament to be a
proselytizing people (Mat.23:15) had ceased evangelizing altogether
in the early Middle Ages as a precondition for living as a tolerated
minority in Christian and Muslim lands.'' Conversions to Judaism
were reduced to a minimum as they often posed danger to both
converts and community and were reserved to extraordinary cases
of people who knocked hard on the door and proved their sincerity ,
beyond all doubt. Necessity turned into virtue, and nonproselytiz-
ing became a characteristic of the Jewish religion. Jews, who consid-
ered their religious heritage a part of their ethnic and cultural
identity, could not understand why Christians could not leave them
alone and evangelize in their own quarters only. Jews, including ed-
ucated ones, were ignorant of the characteristics and motivation of
evangelical Christianity. Needless to say, when Christians who sup-
ported or were involved in proselytizing Jews were confronted with
the Jewish arguments against missionizing they were not persuaded.
They knew ahead of time that Jews would resent the attempts to
evangelize them and would misinterpret their meaning. They were
about to evangelize Jews whether the Jewish community liked it or
not? From their perspective, evangelism was legitimate and propa-